I’m beginning to suspect TB is taking payola from the chiropractic industry when he submits sideways Batom comic book covers like in today’s strip. Let’s make that money go to waste…

This is one of the wackier Batom covers and, frankly, one of the better ones I think. Such whimsy, however, falls a bit flat when juxtaposed with Les whining about having to actually work to promote his books. Work? Oh the horror!

15 responses to “Les Cafards”

“The Cockroach”, huh? Well, Les Moore sure is a “cock” something all right. Look at him simpering over having to meet and greet people who bought his crappy books…boo-hoo. While his colleagues back at WHS are still staring into the dead lifeless eyes of Westview’s forlorn and hapless youth, Dick Facey is signing autographs and ordering room service, yet it’s all just too much for the Delicate Genius to handle. What. A. Dick. You know what, Tom? If you hate doing signings then don’t do them, this passive-aggressive sad-sack “oh the many woes of the writer’s craft” bullshit is really grating on my nerves.

Y’know, a “mutant zombie vampire cockroach” sounds like it has a lot more powers than a superhero named “The Cockroach”, who I imagine is a man with the power to survive a nuclear holocaust who runs into a closet whenever someone switches on a light. So Brainstorm is transferring his nemesis’ consciousness into a more powerful body.

The interesting thing about this is not Les’s passive-aggressive whining about how terrible it is to have everything you could ever want. The interesting thing is that we’re looking at the character who pretty much sank Batom Comics. Y’see, Not!Marvel was able to prove that they’d blatantly plagiarized Not!Spider-Man and expected to be allowed to do so because they needed at least one win even if it was on a technicality.

“All these weeks on the road”? We’ve seen where Less drove to a close-by book signing, and that’s it? Weeks on the road in the middle of teaching? Geesh, just go to the graveyard and give Lisa a dry-hump, that’ll chase the blues away for ya Less.

“Aw, come on, Les! You do this every time! I can’t keep letting you come and go as you please! Now I have to hire a sub for you, and on one day’s notice. Do you want to work here or not?”

“Hmmff. I get it. Another Lisa Hater. I guess some children WERE left behind. I guess you LIKE cancer.”

“GODDAMMIT, Les, that’s not it! Your frequent extended absences are disruptive to the students and to your department. You know that! So how long this time?”

“Several weeks. But it will be HARRRRRRD! Being on the road is HARRRRRRD! Writing is HARRRRRRRRRRRRRD! But my public demands it. LISA demands it!”

“Sorry, man, but this is a choice you have to make for yourself. We can’t keep covering for you and disrupting your classes on a day’s notice every time you want to sell a few books. We have a school to run here. Request denied. As long as you have a job here, THAT comes first. Travel all over the world all you want on your own time.”

“Come on Nate! Believe me, I wouldn’t do book tours if I didn’t HAVE to. You think I enjoy this? I don’t! And the worst of it is having to leave Cayla home alone for weeks on end!”

I liked these stupid sideways Sunday “tributes” much better when TB would simply steal the cover art of a real comic from fifty or sixty years ago and shoehorn in his own characters. Now he’s commissioning covers from some renowned comics artists, and every cover depicts a figure from his bizarro Bantom publishing house of the mind. Instead of having the covers reflect what’s happening in the story, he clumsily attempts to relate the plot to the fake comic cover. Sad!

I think he might have been anticipating that his Bantom comics thing would really take off creatively, so he commissioned a huge amount of covers from his friends (probably giving them a character name from his fifth-grade notebook). Then, I guess a lot like Les, he decided that all that work was a huge amount of work and thus not worth doing, but he had all those covers and had to use them somehow.

Today’s example is a great one: there’s no creative contribution at all from Tom Batiuk, while Tom Palmer’s work is quite good.